Microcontroller Projects Using the Basic Stamp

The requires a lot more knowledge and materials than the BASIC Stamp Board of Education than you buy at Radio Shack. I was in electronics engineering classes and found many of the projects to be too difficult.

This book is for the beginner that wants to get into electronics and has heard that the Stamp is a pretty cool thing. The book starts out with an introduction to the Stamp and Electronics in general. From this, the user is given more detail on the Basic Stamp. The majority of the book is dedicated to the projects presented in the book and this is where I learned the most about the Stamp. The projects focus on interfacing to other devices and this is where the book really shines.

The author has a good approach in revealing some of the pitfalls with using the Basic Stamp.Advanced users will certainly find some of Al's solutions very heplful, as he explains in detail floating point expressions, and working with negative numbers.Inside the book is good code on interfacing with a serial LCD, as with others I read, Al has taken some of the mystery out of it, and really puts them to practice in his projects.If your novice to electronics, then this book is for you. Al explains how to interface keypads, switches, LEDS with no experience at all, and certainly makes it look easy.I was impressed by how he expained the circuit diagrams, and other key points on interfacing.Al has also included his own programmer in the book, and I haven't even started to list his ideas for your next project. I'm only giving it a four, because the CD was unreadable, and the publisher was kind of enough to send me another one.